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Paris circa 1970, Front de Seine sunset

For the background story of this image, I was on a photowalk with Serge Ramelli and Scott Kelby, we had set an appointment near the Eiffel Tower under the Bir Hakeim Bridge. I was a bit early and was looking for an interesting spot to shoot the Eiffel Tower. But the sun was setting behind me and I liked the reflection on the buildings.

Actually to the horror of many tourists, when they arrive towards the Eiffel Tower they see this bizarre area called Front de Seine with an architecture from the 1970s (and not the best of the 70s).

In the 1970s, during one of the weaker moments of city planing, Paris built skyscrapers. Montparnasse Tower and the Front de Seine were some of the results of that. There are more of them, but because I’m in a good mood and I still want you to come see Paris I will not talk about those.

This isn’t an HDR picture per-se, what I mean is that technically I didn’t merge multiple pictures. But it was meant to be. I took three exposures but for this one I worked mainly on the under-exposed image and brightened it up.

Am enjoying the new Lightroom and Photoshop and with the enhanced retouching power, I find it less necessary to use HDR process because there’s a lot more to be extracted out of the raw files.

On the composition I like the foreground / background and the “river” of light that separates them.

Critiques welcome.

For the high-res image click on the picture below:

Manually retouched image of Paris Front de Seine area near Eiffel Tower.